In his current exhibition at Loock Galerie, entitled Book Off/ Cut Off, Takehito Koganezawa is showing new drawings, watercolors, installations, and sculptures.

Koganezawa uses various media like performance, video, sculpture, and drawing to examine the notion of time, and to raise questions about shifting values in today’s consumer society. Our accelerated lives and the growing complexity of everyday life also changed the status of books as collective cultural goods in today’s society.

The artist asks, “What does it mean today to read books?” and then states, “Reading a text and owning a book is today not the same thing. A while ago, glancing at a person’s bookshelves would reveal quite a bit about him or her. Today, our values have changed, and large art books are only to be found in libraries.” He is interested in precisely those books that collect dust in private living rooms as “unnecessary decorative objects” and end up “like nobles in exile in ‘Book Off’ shops.”

In Japan, trading second-hand books began in 1990. Discarded books find a final resting place, and with difficulty sometimes also new owners happy to read them, in the chain of antiquarian bookshops “Book Off” that started cropping up in 1990 in Japan; today these shops can also be found in Europe. For his latest installation at Loock, Koganezawa devoted special attention to these books: “I collected and bought all these exquisite books, which used to be a source of pride, I opened them and with a sigh filled my lungs with their fertile culture, and then looked up form their pages again. “

Koganezawa links the media of video and book and counters the global quick consumerism with the question of traditional values and how far they are rooted in humans today. He leaves the public with the question, “What are the foundations of your thinking?”